When thinking about website monetization, Google Adsense is probably the first thing that came to the mind of many people. Created in 2004, Adsense is the easiest way to make money online. Making real money with Google Adsense is not as easy as it seems, but if Adsense wasn’t an efficient way to make money online, people would stop using it.
In this article, I’m going to show you 10 efficient tips to really make money with Adsense.

Understand on which sites Adsense works

One of the best Adsense tip I can give you is to know which niche are good and wich ones are to avoid.

Avoid “SmartPricing” like the plague

Smartpricing (which is everything but smart…) is when Google automatically gives the advertiser a discount based on the perceived value of your web site. Certain types of sites supposedly generate more sales so get a higher cost per click while others are typically more lookers and get paid less per click.

If Google placed your blog in the second category, no luck for you. In fact, for the same click on the same ad, a website can earn $1 while another will get on 10 cents!

In order to avoid getting “Smartpriced” by Google, you have to try to keep your CTR high. Low CTR sites (under 1 or 2%) generally ends up by being smartpriced.

Place Adsense ads on old posts only

In order to avoid smartpricing, a great idea is to display Adsense ads on old posts only. Why? Because the vast majority of your regular visitors don’t click on ads. By showing Adsense on old posts only, you’ll definitely keep your CTR high.

The following function have to be pasted in the functions.php file of your WordPress theme.

function is_old_post($post_id=null){
   $days = 15;
   global $wp_query;
   if(is_single() || is_page()) {
      if(!$post_id) {
         $post_id = $wp_query->post->ID;
      }
      $current_date = time();
      $offset = $days *60*60*24;
      $post_id = get_post($post_id);
      $post_date = mysql2date('U',$post_id->post_date);
      $cunning_math = $post_date + $offset;
      $test = $current_date - $cunning_math;
      if($test > 0){
         $return = true;
      }else{
         $return = false;
      }
   }else{
      $return = false;
   }
   return $return;
}

Once you successfully inserted the code into your function.php file, you are now ready to call the functions in your single.php template as shown below:

<?php if(is_old_post()){ ?>
INSERT AD CODE HERE
<?php } ?>

Identify high paying keywords

To appear on Adsense ads, advertisers have to bid on a specific keyword. Some keywords, such as “mortgage” have a way higher CPC than others.

A great way to maximize your Adsense income is to identify those high paying keywords and use them in your blog. Several lists of high paying keywords are available on the Internet, some are free and some aren’t.
A good list to start with is this one, which is completely free.

Work with keywords

Although you can’t directly control which Adsense ads appears on your site, you can work with keywords in the hope that Google will display related contextual ads.

For example, if you’re writing a post about Javascript, the keyword “javascript” has strong chances of being used in Adsense ads. If you want Adsense to display ads based on high paying keywords, you have to put these keywords on your document. Don’t abuse though; you may be penalized by Google.

To check your keyword density, here is a great tool : http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

Use section targeting

As I said before, in order to maximize your revenue you have to work on keywords. But what if Adsense is displaying ads based on a keyword you don’t want to be used? Using section targeting, you can emphasis some text as well as asking Adsense to ignore some other.

The following example shows how to use section targeting in your posts:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
    Content you want to emphasize.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
    Content you want to be ignored by Adsense
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Display Adsense to search engine visitors only

Another way to avoid being smartpriced is definitely to display Adsense ads only to visitors who came from search engines.
The following WordPress hack will do that job perfectly. To apply it to your blog, insert the code below in your theme functions.php file.
Note that the $SE array is where you specify search engines. You can easily ad new search engines by adding new elements to the array.

function scratch99_fromasearchengine(){
  $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
  $SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
  foreach ($SE as $source) {
    if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
  }
  return false;
}

Once done, open the file where you want to display the ads and paste the following code:

if (function_exists('scratch99_fromasearchengine')) {
  if (scratch99_fromasearchengine()) {
    INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
  }
}

Save the file, and you’re done. Thanks to Stephen Cronin for the hack!

Go Large!

Adsense ads can be displayed in various formats, but they don’t provide the same results. Although it depends of many factors such as your blog niche and layout, the large rectangle (336×280) has proven to be the best paying Adsense format. It is also one of the few Adsense block which can display video ads.

Use a personalized Google search engine on your blog

Many people don’t like the way WordPress search works, and I must admit that this is not the best feature of my favorite blogging engine. In order to have better search results for my readers, I decided to give a try to a Google custom search engine. You can try it, search form is located on my blog sidebar.

The tools works very well, and you can start monetizing it using Adsense. I found out that on Cats Who Blog, the search engine is very profitable. For those who’d like to learn how to add Google search to their blog, a very old post from Cats Who Code explains how to do it.

Don’t break Adsense terms of service

At last but not least, one of the best bits of advice I can give to anyone who’d like to make money online using Google Adsense is to be careful with the terms of service. For example, if you click on your own ads, or display incentive messages on your site, Google will quickly finds out and they will consenquently ban your site from Adsense.

You have to play by their rules, so don’t thing you are smarter than them. Respect the terms of services, optimize your ads using the tips I just gave you, and write great content so people will visit your site and click on your ads.

As you probably know if you’re reading this blog from the start, my startegy to make money online is to multiply income sources the most I can. I got some blogs and websites, I’m a domainer and an affiliate marketer.
But as Twitter became more and more popular, many people, me inclued, saw how they can use it to make money online. In this article, I’m going to show you how I make money online using Twitter, and how you can do the same.

Promoting your blog and driving traffic

When you get retweeted by popular tweeter accounts (Some have more than 20000 followers) at an hour of the day where many people are behind their computers, results can be extremely great.

As you can see on the screenshot below, taken from Cats Who Code statistics, Twitter is one of my top sources of traffic.

Some of my Cats Who Code posts are retweeted up to 700 times. How it is possible?
First, I use a Tweetmeme button which allow my readers to share my posts quickly and easily. The easier retweeting is for your visitors, the more they will retweet.
Secondly, I often ask my followers to RT my posts. Some people may not agree on that one, but personally, I have no problem when someone ask for RTs because I’m still free to do it or not. The two remaining “techniques” I use are to get as many followers as possible (assuming they’re interested in my tweets, otherwise they scrictly don’t have any value) and to have lots of friends like I explained in this previous post.

Making money on Twitter directly

Here we go: Lots of people are using Twitter to drive traffic to their blog posts, but just a few are making money directly on twitter, without even having a blog or website of anykind.

The only things you need are Twitter and Paypal accounts. Follow people who sell products such as WordPress themes, ebooks, etc. When they tweet about one of their products, simply retweet them. Of course, don’t forget to change the url used in the original tweet by your own affiliate url, so you’ll make the comission for the traffic you drove.

Easy, isn’t it? The only thing you have to do is to get followers that are interested in the kind of products you’re tweeting about. A twitter account should be focused on a particular niche if you want to make money with it.

By the way, I just created a new Twitter account dedicated to Cats Who Blog, so click here to follow my blogging tips!

On the internet, security have always been a big concern. As an example, how many times did you heard friends complaining that their blog were hacked? The internet is full of good people, but just like in real life, there’s also thieves and vandals. Being a website owner, you have to deal with these people, and you have to be the stronger. Happilly, several tools can help you to protect your digital properties.
Today, I’m having a look at the promising WordPress Defender, an all new ebook written to help you protecting your blog.

If you’d like to purchase WordPress Defender, you can get it with a $4 discount. click here to get your discount code.

Introducing WordPress Defender

Just like in real life, some people just like to bother others, and the only thing you can do against them is to protect yourself. Happilly, WordPress is by default quite secure and have a strong community behing it, which ensure that any potential security loophole will be corrected in a matter of hours. Some basic security tips, such as a strong password, a quality host and database/files backup will avoid most problems.

But, hackers are not silly people. Althought the 3 simple tips I just gave you will prevent from 99 percent of potential attacks, there’s always a risk. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but this risk is simple: loosing your blog, buisiness or customers. Remember how Designfloat.com were popular back in 2008? Unfortunely, it was hacked and taken offline for almost a week. It took a while for the site to get users back, and believe me, it could have been even worst.

What you’re going to learn

Most websites owners are not security expert, and a lot of them don’t even know how to develop websites. With tools like WordPress, creating a website have never been easier. Unfortunely, most users don’t know anything about website security or even worst, don’t pay attention to it. Of course, if one day they visit their site and see something like below, they’ll regret the bad decision of not paying enought attention to their blog security.

Althought there’s no “perfect” protection for your blog, WordPress Defender can help you to protect your blog, mostly by studying hackers techniques. For example, you’ll learn:

• Brute force password discovery
• Hacking other sites to learn how to get into your site
• Downloading viruses to your computer
• Pose as friends you have and set up fake social media profiles
• Gain access to your WordPress Dashboard by registering themselves for your blog
• Hacking your FTP connection
• Intercepting your username and password during WordPress logins
• Exploiting weak plugins and themes
• Using Google Search to find outdated blogs – could that be yours?

And so on. Each of the techniques above are shown, discussed and at last but not least, you’ll see how to efficiently protect your blog from those attacks.

My personnal advice on the book

Althought great security tips can be found on the “Digging into WordPress” book and the WordPress Cookbook I wrote, the good point of WordPress Defender is that the book is 100% focused on the security concern. WordPress Defender is especially a great investment for beginners or people who don’t know a lot about websites security. Though, things are detailed deeply so WordPress experts will still have something new to learn.
Just like the highly popular “Digging into WordPress“, this book is a definitive must have for WordPress bloggers. Click here to buy.

In june 2008, I founded Cats Who Code. Less than two years later, I felt that I had to take this website to a new level, a transform a good blog into a great blog. In this article, I’ll let you know what I’ve done, what I’m doing and what I plan to do to take my blog to the next level.

It all starts with a goal

Why blogs like SixRevisions.com receive so many traffic? The answer is pretty simple. They produce lots of good content, and work a lot. Cats Who Code had good content, but this wasn’t enought. In January 2010, I decided to take it to the next level and make it one of the most popular web development blogs of the world. The first step will be to get 10000 RSS readers before the 2nd birthday in June.
Yes, this is very ambitious. But without ambitions, you’re going to stay where you are.

First step: remove things that sucks

Cats WHo Code was my first “pro” blog, so I made lots of mistakes on that one. Novice bloggers wants to make money quick, and often look for the most possible ways to get some cash. In the past years, I have made lots of crappy sponsored reviews on Cats Who Code. It made me earn $200 or $300, but it also made my blog look amateur.
This is why, I removed most sponsored reviews. No one ever told me about it, which just shown how useless those posts where to my readers.

I was also a Text Links Ads user. As most of you know, Google don’t want you to sell text links (they prefer you to use Adsense, no comments) and they noticied that I was doing it. They punished me for not obeying: Cats Who Code pagerank dropped down to zero in January.
I definitely hate how Google is trying to get control over what you can and can’t do on your own website. In my opinion, this is clearly a dictatorial method. But you haven’t the choice, you can’t fight against them. So I did what they want, I removed text links to keep my credibility.

Step 2: Polish you blog

Although I wrote a post about speeding up your blog, due to the high traffic Cats Who Code was desperatly slow. At the time, I was hosted at WpWebHost, which is a great host (This blog is hosted by them) but when you receive so much traffic, shared hosting is not enought. I decided to make the move to a virtual private server, and chose vpsnet because they allow you to allocate more resources to your server when needed. For example, if you receive more traffic on mondays because you publish your posts that day, you can add more memory to your server for a day only. This is very a cool thing in my opinion.

Along with migrating to a VPS server, I created a new theme for the blog, which is more clean and more optimized for high traffic (less images, few scripts). I also replaced the horrible header banner by a second “above content” banner. This new spot, currently priced $100, sold on the first day. This is motivating.

Step 3: Content, content, content!

Having a beautiful and fast blog is good, but the only thing that make people come and visit your blog is content. It is clear that if I want to make Cats Who Code one of the most popular web development blogs of the world, I have to produce a lot of quality content.
Currently, I can only produce one quality post per week, which is not enought. In my opinion, publishing 2/3 posts per week is the right thing. This is why I decided to hire guest bloggers, paid up to $75 for a cool web development post.

Conclusion

Two weeks after migrating cats Who Code to his new VPS server, I’m pretty happy by the encouraging results I got, both in terms of traffic and community feedback.
Since two weeks, Cats Who Code RSS readers have slighty increased, peaking at 8300+ on Friday 19, 2010, which for the first time, was higher than the amount of WpRecipes readers (8100+).

An important thing to note is that this move to the new level is costing me a lot of money : The VPS server is priced $80/month and as I previously said, guest writers will be paid up to $75 per post. As I stopped selling text ads and sponsored reviews, the site income slighty lowered as well.
So why am I doing it? This is simple: This is an investment on quality. Right now, the blog is not providing me as much money as it should because I have to pay the guest writers and the server, but it is a sure thing that with more quality articles, traffic will increase and ads price will be increased as well.

I know I talked a lot about the Headway Theme recently, but as an efficient blogger there’s another WordPress theme you may want to try: It is called ShiftNews and it have just been released by WPShift, a company from England dedicated in producing high quality WordPress themes.

In this article, let’s have a look to ShiftNews and let’s see what it have to offer.

If you’d like to buy ShiftNews, don’t forget to visit my other site Coupons for Bloggers to get a 10% discount!

The design

Functionnalities

Of course, when you spend money in a so-called “premium” WordPress theme, you want a great design, but you also need your theme to stand out of the crowd by its functionnalities. And ShiftNews have a lot of functionnalities.

Recently WordPress themes have become a lot more advanced and ShiftNews certainly doesn’t disappoint with the features. The homepage is completely widgetised meaning you can take advantage of the built in widgets (which include a choice of featured content sliders, a traditional blog style look and a magazine style column widget!) to create a layout that’s custom for your site. Because the theme uses WordPress’ widgets, you can just drag and drop bits around your homepage which makes using ShiftNews a pleasure.

The documentation included is impressive too – along with a 2000 word long written documentation, there are a whole load of video screencasts embedded in the theme itself so you’re never left wondering what to do next. For example, if you were configuring one of your featured content sliders, you could just watch a screencast right within the widget control panel to see what to do!

Even more features

• Built in contact form
• Ten widget ready areas
• Blog layout page template
• Your own custom homepage layout
• Effortless image resizing
• Multiple post tempaltes
• Multiple jQuery slider widgets
• Awesome dropdown navigation
• Four built in colour schemes with a colour picker to help you make your own
• Social media links
• Threaded comments
• Built in support for popular plugins including PageNavi and YARPP
• Custom search engine options
• Optimised and efficient code

ShiftNews by WPShift. $59.95

You know it : Making money blogging and reaching online success aren’t easy things. There’s many things that you can do in order to maximize your chances of success. One of these things is reciprocal help, a technique that I’m using since years and which always providing great results.
In this article, I’m going to show what you can do to help other bloggers while they help you.

Link exchange

Personally, I’m not a fan of link exchange, mostly because it takes a big amount of space on your blog. Also, a great blog will naturally get backlinks by other sites. Though, my site Cats Who Code has been in Smashing Magazine’s blogroll for a while and it provided me more than 100 unique visitors on a daily basis.

Another problem with reciprocal links is that Google have told that they will not have the same “seo weight” than non-reciprocal links. Why? Because they thinks that a non reciprocal link have more value because it is not an agreement between bloggers.

ReTweeting each other

Twitter is an excellent way for bloggers to promote their content. On almost all my sites, Twitter is in the top five traffic providers. Depending on your number of followers and the time of the day, a single tweet could lead to 200+ unique visitors to your blog post.

Retweeting tweets from your friends is definitely a great way to help them. Of course, the best you can do is to set up alliances with your friends: You’ll retweet them, they’ll retweet you.

Even better than retweeting…Using Tweeterfeed

What about automating reciprocal help? If you’re used to retweet your friend’s tweets while they retweet yours, a great solution is to use Twitterfeed. What is Twitterfeed? It is a tool that allow you to automatically tweet an item from a RSS feed. Just sign in using your Twitter account, define which feeds have to be tweeted, and that’s all.

I’m personally using this technique along with several friends and it is a very good solution to help each other.

Voting at social bookmarking sites

As a blogger, a great way to get quality backlinks and traffic is social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, Delicious and DesignBump. Reciprocal help is definitely the shortest way to achieve social bookmarking success.

I have experienced it personally with lots of friends, asking them to vote for my posts on bookmarkings sites while I vote for them. Some people might say it’s unfair, but at least, it works. Though, be aware that some sites are using complex algorithms in order to limit reciprocal help and make sure that people hitting the frontpage are “legitimate” users, not bloggers team who are voting for their friends.
Digg and DesignBump are using that kind of algorithms, but most sites aren’t.

Good communication

At last but not least, a good communication is a very important thing in order to maintain solid relationships with your blogging friends. It can sounds not so important but believe me, if you want to have a team of bloggers helping each others it is very important to stay in touch regulary, on twitter or via email.

And you, have you already experienced reciprocal help in order to get more online success?

Some time ago I showed you some really cool customizations of the Thesis theme for WordPress and then reviewed a newer theme called Headway. Today let’s have a look to what Headway has to offer; not only you can customize it, but you can create your own layout within the theme so your blog will not look like something which already exists.

About Headway

If you’re interested in buying the Headway Theme, you can get a 20% discount here.

Time for showcase! Here are the 10 most awesome blog layouts created within Headway.

Headway

http://www.headwaythemes.com

Parent by heart

http://www.parentbyheart.com

Legal Practice Pro

http://www.legalpracticepro.com

Danny Brown

http://www.dannybrown.me

Thomas Schoenweitz

http://www.thomasschoenweitz.com

Headway Hacks

http://www.headwayhacks.com

Remarkablogger

http://www.remarkablogger.com

Homepage Construction Company

http://www.homepageconstructionco.com

Jim Conolly

http://jimsmarketingblog.com

Springfield Chiropractor

http://www.springfieldchiropractorblog.com

That’s a sure thing, the week end is definitely the favorite time of the week for many people. But how can you use efficiently the spare time you have on week ends to enhance your blog? In this article, I’m going to show you how I use my week end time and give you some tips.

Take the time to relax

Make your schedule for the week

Being organized is very good for efficient blogging. Each week end, I take an average 30 minutes to think about what posts I should write and what improvements I could make to my blogs during the week.

I use a Moleskine notebook to write my ideas, organize my schedule and remeber what I have to do. It is a real life saver for a busy person like me, who own more than 10 blogs!

Upgrade WordPress

WordPress upgrades are boring, but necessary to make sure your blog is secure. I personally like to upgrade WordPress as well as the plugins I use on week ends, to make sure I’ll have the required time to repair my blog if a problem happens.
WordPress upgrades problems are quite rare, but that doesn’t mean they can’t happen. And if it happen, you’ll be happy to be able to repair your blog right now!

Perform maintenance

You probably have noticied that on week ends, your blog is getting less visitors than during the week. This means week ends are the best time to change your WordPress theme or implement design changes.
Remember to use the maintenance mode WordPress plugin if you want to prevent visitors accessing your blog while performing maintenance.

Work on the week posts

By definition, saturdays and sundays are the days of the week where you have spare time. In order to have less work to do on the other week days, what about starting to work on your scheduled blog posts?
Especially in the case of very long and complex articles, you’ll be very happy to have some advance.

Guest blog

I have already demonstrated how guest blogging is good for you and your blog. So what about using some of your week end spare time to give it a try? You’ll probably be very happy with it!

Read other blogs

Reading other blogs is one of the best – if not the best – way to stay tuned with what’s hot in the blogging world theses days.
When you’re a blogger yourself, it can be hard to find the time to read 15 or 20 blogs on a daily basis. But on week ends, you can easily take the time to read your favorite blogs and stay tuned with the latest news and trends.

So you want to create a (new) blog? Congratulations! This is a very good idea!
Before your blog goes live you have to be sure about something really important things: what you will talk about and how you’ll do it so you’ll not end up with an abandonned blog one year after launching your new project. In fact, choosing a niche and stay sticked to it is one of the essential keys for success in blogging.

Why your blog should stick to a single topic

Reaching success in blogging isn’t easy, especially if you never blogged before and don’t know how social media and blogging works. The biggest mistake in blogging, which cause failure to many blogs is definitely blogs which aren’t focused to a particular niche.

Let’s take an easy example : John works at a library, so he knows a lot about books. He also like heavy metal music and would like to share his passion for this music with others. John decides to create his blog and start by publishing 5 books reviews.
In another place, an old woman who recently bought a computer find John’s blog. She really enjoyed his books reviews, so she grabbed the RSS feed and add it to her google reader. (Yeah, I know, she’s a modern grandma…)

The next day, John decide to publish a review of his favorite metal band. A couple of minutes later, the grandma sees a new item on her RSS reader and reads it, believing it was a new book review like those she enjoyed.

I guess you imagine how surprised the grandma should be. She wanted to see books reviews like she was used to, and ended up reading a metal album review. You guessed it, she unsubscribed from the feed and John lost his most loyal reader.

As shown in the example, John’s posts were good, but he lost readers because his blog was talking about too many different subjects.

But what I like different things?

In life, this is in my opinion a good thing to be interested by many different things. To tell you a bit about myself, of course I love blogging, web development and WordPress, but I also love music, guitars, politics, animals and many others.

Imagine just a second that I start to publish articles showing how to play the guitar and playing with your dog on WpRecipes. Those article might be great, but people visit WpRecipes to read about WordPress hacks, not something else.

This is why you should stick to your niche. One of the biggest mistake I’ve done when I started Cats Who Code was to blog about web development, Linux, and blogging tips on the same blog. Since I created this blog and began to remove “blogging tips” articles from Cats Who Code, I got more RSS subscribers than before.

Tips to get a great niche idea

The first tip I’d give is obviously to follow your interest. If you’re a soccer fan, a soccer blog makes sense. But instead of creating another soccer blog, you should find something more specific, as such as transferts or goal videos.

No idea? Visit Dmoz.com. Despite its horrible 90’s looking design, this site is one of the largest directories on the internet, and there’s no doubt that you may find some great niche ideas on there.

Another way to find a great niche is to start with something you love and then move forward to a smaller and more specific niche. For example, let’s start with “Internet”: web development, PHP language, PHP framework…The PHP Symfony framework. In fact, there’s no (or maybe one or two) blogs about the very cool Symfony framework for the PHP programming language.
If you know your subject (of course!) you should definitely focus on a smaller and unexploited niche.

All bloggers loves to receive comments and feedback on their articles. But how do you handle negative feedback? As a blog grows, it becomes more exposed to negative comments. Despite the fact theses comments aren’t flattering, they’re good for your blog. Don’t believe me? Here’s 8 reasons to show you why.

You can be wrong

Criticized posts are…popular posts

Last year, my “How to: Customize your GNU/Linux desktop in 7 easy steps” article hitted digg.com front page. Many readers and digg users left negative comments on the article, mostly saying that the article was for Ubuntu instead of GNU/Linux. It can be very easy to think that this article sucks because of the important amount of negative feedback. But hey, wait. You said, it hitted digg.com front page, right?
So, despite the negative comments, more than 700 people digged this article, which is definitely not a bad deal!

Negative comments on your blog shows that you respect your readers and their thoughts

Some blog owners delete negative comments. Sure, negative comments aren’t flattering, but well, if you provide a way for your readers to express their views about your article, you should respect their right to criticize.
Not censoring negative comments shows that you respect your readers point of view and that you are an open-minded person.

Negative comments can create a debate

Debates are always a good thing for your blog: They encourages rss subscriptions, comments and can provide new backlinks.
So, when someone left a negative comment, maybe another reader will respond, and a new debate will start, which is good for your blog.

Negative comments don’t devalue your blog

When I was younger, I use to think that a negative comment can influence other people. But people have their own advice about things. If I find a very cool blog post, I’ll leave a comment saying I loved it, nevermind if 1, 5 or even 10 peoples left negatives comments.

Negative comments are…content

That’s simple as that. A comment is content and there’s nothing better for seo than content.

Only the unknown aren’t criticized

Think about Microsoft: If you google the term Fuck Microsoft, you’ll get 418.000 results. That’s really a lot of people who doesn’t like them. But they’re also being criticized a lot because it’s a very big company and everyone knows Microsoft, even my grandmother.
As a blog grows, it become more and more exposed to negative feedback. Negative feedback is definitely a good indication of growth.

What about you?

And you, what’s your thoughts on negative blog comments? Do you hate it, or do you think it’s a great way to improve your blog general quality? Let’s talk about it.